Let it be well understood that today 1JUN20 that SHTF in the United States is now official. Elements have been building up for some time, most certainly. And there have been some events that definitely contributed to this situation, but make absolutely no mistake. SHTF is now active and the entire United States is in turmoil.

• 50 Secret Service officers have been wounded in clashes at the White House in Washington DC.
• President Trump is in a bunker.
• The entire nation is on military alert, with elements of the DHS and Military on stand by or deployed.
• All of the large cities (140+) are in the midst of riots and turmoil.

As with anything, it’s difficult to pick a time when an event starts. Does Christmas start at 12:01 25 December, or when children wake up? Does it start when the presents are opened? Or, is is a month-long holiday with different phases.

Ah…

Let’s not parse the details too severely. All that wonderful “freedom”, “liberty” and “democracy” that Americans are so very happy that they have has…

… reared it’s ugly face.

In fact, it is nothing of the sort. It’s all just fancy slogans, endlessly repeated, by a dumbed down mindless mass of serfs. The United States is a military oligarchy-run empire, and the peasants are tired of it.

People are pissed off.

Some of them are just bored, and want a “regular” life.

Some are opportunists.

Some want to burn it all down, and literally kill anyone who is doing better than themselves.

If you all think that it’s going to die down in a day or two you are deluded. This is the start of a long slow collapse. Oh, certain regions will fare better than others. Certain people will do better than others, and certain situations will bring more advantages than others.

But that’s not what I am afraid of.

I’m afraid of the morons running the United States. For typically when there is economic turmoil such as this, the answer is always “distraction by war”. It focuses the people to something outside the poorly run domestic economy. And since this “domestic turmoil” is so expansive (this time), the up-scaled version of war could also be “up-scaled”.

• Trump escalates attacks on China over COVID-19
• President Trump declares NATIONAL EMERGENCY
• Trump Administration Restricts Entry Into U.S. From China
• Trump attacks China while announcing US withdrawal from …
• Trump launches unprecedented attack on China
• Trump’s desperate attacks on China are a sign of his …

Ah…

But that is just me.

And, I tend to be wrong about 50% of the time, don’t you know.

You are Here…

Leadership in hiding

The idea that President Trump is in a bunker, safe and sound under the White House while America is in flames reminds me of another event…

… when Hitler hunkered down in a bunker in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin while all of Germany burns.

While I actually am equating Trump with Hitler, it should not be misconstrued. I am actually equating the events of the collapse of the United States with the collapse of Germany. The mere fact that it is President Trump in Washington at this time instead of Obama, Bush, or Clinton makes no difference.

President Trump is a man of great strengths and great faults. He just happens to be at the helm at this historic event.

Other thoughts…

People of greater capability than I, and those with better writing skills have weighed in on this sequence of events. I find them illuminating. And now some “doom porn” for those of you who can stomach it…

One month ago, Daisy Luther at Organic Prepper saw desperation setting in:

A whopping 71% of jobless Americans haven’t gotten their unemployment payments from March. Lines at food banks are literally miles long in some areas. Rents and mortgages are not being paid. Anger is increasing. Soon it’s going to bubble over into rage and when it does, we could see unrest and crime like we haven’t seen in this country in centuries.

Charles Smith at Of Two Minds says What’s Collapsing Can’t Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy. Excerpts:

We live in a constantly distorted house of mirrors devoted to maintaining useful illusions of "democracy," "free markets" and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to reduce the pain of living a vast, all-encompassing fraud in which everyone who isn't a grifting insider is the loser.

We don't just have financial bubbles that are popping; we have bubbles in trust and credibility that are popping, too. All the lies, skims, scams, excuses, frauds, bezzles, artifices, profiteering, promotional schemes and rackets are unraveling, not because the virus shut down the economy but because the enormity of all the corruption, lies and fraud is now so great that the entire status quo is collapsing under its own weight...

Once the system collapses, we all lose, even the insiders who have traded every shred of their soul for financial gains, at the expense of everything that was once held dear.

National Post – Billionaire’s Instagram-perfect isolation on a luxury superyacht draws public outrage … as the world’s wealthy stay in vacation homes, custom bunkers or floating palaces, workers from nurses to supermarket cashiers juggle childcare and risk infection working essential jobs.

The Z Man (April 2020) – There’s lots of red lights flashing in the debt markets and the supply chain. The next months will be interesting. Maybe that will be how everyone forgets about this month of living like lepers and treating everyone like they stink. Before people can start to think about why they were locked in their homes, they will be directed to the next drama, the financial and economic panic of 2020. Perhaps the lesson here is the circus part of our bread and circuses is the government creating increasingly reckless panics seeing if they can blow it all up. Maybe this is all for their entertainment.

Riots, Z Man – The current black riots are being described as unprecedented, when in fact they are a regular feature of American life. Birds fly, fish swim and blacks riot. Amusingly, the man allegedly responsible for these riots, President Trump, you know, because of the low black unemployment, is in office because of the last round of black riots. In fact, black rioting is one of the regular features of the ongoing morality play that is modern liberal democracy. The usual suspects, looking for a reason to get white people to the theater, start scanning about for some case where a black was harmed by an unsympathetic white. They create a narrative around the incident, have the stories placed in the media and then encourage the black “activist groups” to start making an issue of it. From there, the story writes itself.

George Ure at Urban Survival: The food situation is getting dicey with meat, including pork and some poultry production coming off-line. And that will evolve over coming months into supply chain collapses and a general reset of lifestyles at a much lower-than-recent levels.

Putting everyone under house arrest and collapsing the economy is just the beginning. The can is being kicked and it moveth not. A historic catastrophe is plainly visible. Someone else's fine tuned and compelling opinion won't save you. Those who can save themselves will save themselves, not you. Those who can't save themselves certainly won't save you. Who does that leave?

Collapse, Of Two Minds – “Success” in America is now a game of creating believable facsimiles of what was once authentic. This requirement to hide the truth lest it collapse all the skims, scams, frauds, rackets and insider plundering and pillaging is the Monster Id of America. The more the insiders and institutional technocrat machinery attempt to censor and suppress critical inquiry, the greater the erosion of public trust in the credibility and legitimacy of the dominant institutions. When reality and truth become the sworn enemies of society’s political and economic elites, the society is well and truly doomed.

Steven Greenhut at Spectator reminds us how far we’ve fallen into a police state. An excerpt:

The current situation eventually will pass, but any time there’s any crisis — real, perceived, or exaggerated — government will instantly hit the police-state panic button. Thanks to so much of the reporting on the pandemic, which mostly has targeted those politicians who didn’t “do something” quickly enough, we’ll see an arms race over who can take the boldest moves without delaying over quaint concerns about our liberties.

Just as Americans have become accustomed to the TSA’s security theater and to endless police cameras and checkpoints, we soon may also become accustomed to routine lockdowns and arbitrary edicts any time officials get wind of a coming health or other problem. We won’t know for sure, of course, but just wait until next year’s flu season.

James Kunstler sees “a harsher, hungrier, angrier society of broken promises and dashed expectations” when “the hocus-pocus of Modern Monetary Theory” crashes in a heap. Excerpt:

The world never reached such a pitch of activity up to the blow-ups of 2008, and it went through the motions for a decade after that. Now that it’s stopped, all that’s left is the law of gravity, and it doesn’t get more basic. The “wealth” acquired in the decade since by the so-called “one-percent” was loaded onto a defective aircraft, like a Boeing 737-MAX, and an awful lot of it will fall to earth now on broken wings.

Their agents and praetorians on Wall Street are working feverishly to stave off that crash-landing, like a band of magicians casting spells on the ground while that big hunk of juddering metal augers earthward. Wait for it as spring brings new life across the land and things unseen before steal onto the scene.

Excerpts from an EMP op-ed at Washington Examiner:

Can you imagine if our grid went down and we lost electricity for an extended period of time? As bad as our current situation is, it could always be a lot worse. We relied on our government leaders to prepare our country for a pandemic, and we see what that got us. We rely on that same leadership now to protect our electric grid...

The EMP Commission estimates a nationwide blackout of the United States lasting one year could kill 90% of Americans from starvation and societal collapse...

The strategy of pretending to do something but really doing nothing and then throwing money at the threat when it happens will get millions of Americans killed when there is an EMP.

It’s suspicious how many articles about an EMP attack are showing up for no obvious reason.

Experts, Burning Platform – Not one penny of the trillions generated by the Fed out of thin air is helping the 38.6 million people who were thrown out into the streets by government decree. It wasn’t meant to trickle down. It’s just another example of socialism for the corporate fascists and another screw job for the average working stiff. The Fed’s sole purpose is to enrich their banker benefactors, corporate titans, hedge fund managers and corrupt politicians. The unemployment rate is headed toward 30%. GDP in the 2nd quarter will approach -40%. We’ve entered a 2nd Great Depression. The damage is permanent and ultimately fatal.

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge comments on our collapsing food supply chain. An excerpt:

"It's not a lack of food, it's that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven't been able to connect the dots. You've got to galvanize people."

The immediate outcome of this food supply chain collapse will be even more rapid food inflation, hitting Americans at a time of unprecedented economic hardships with at least 26.5 million now unemployed since the pandemic struck the US.

And with a sharp economic recession, if not outright depression unfolding, more Americans are ditching grocery stores for food banks, putting incredible stress on these charities, which has forced the government to deploy National Guard troops at many locations to ensure food security to the neediest.

We’re just circling the drain. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Those ingénues who believe troops are being positioned to “ensure food security” will be among the first to discover otherwise. Get away, and stay away from crowds. It’s the indispensable first step.

Charles Smith at Of Two Minds says What’s Collapsing Can’t Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy. Excerpts:

We live in a constantly distorted house of mirrors devoted to maintaining useful illusions of "democracy," "free markets" and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to reduce the pain of living a vast, all-encompassing fraud in which everyone who isn't a grifting insider is the loser.

We don't just have financial bubbles that are popping; we have bubbles in trust and credibility that are popping, too. All the lies, skims, scams, excuses, frauds, bezzles, artifices, profiteering, promotional schemes and rackets are unraveling, not because the virus shut down the economy but because the enormity of all the corruption, lies and fraud is now so great that the entire status quo is collapsing under its own weight...

Once the system collapses, we all lose, even the insiders who have traded every shred of their soul for financial gains, at the expense of everything that was once held dear.

Lockdowns, Mises Institute – Those who have claimed that lockdowns are “the only option” had virtually no evidence at all to support their position. Indeed, such extreme over-the-top measures such as the general lockdowns required an extreme level of high-quality, nearly irrefutable evidence that lockdowns would work and were necessary in the face of a disease with an extremely high fatality rate. But the only “data” the prolockdown people could offer was speculation and hyperbolic predictions of bodies piling up in the streets. The lockdown crowd destroyed the lives of millions to satisfy the hunches of a tiny handful of politicians and technocrats.

Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man mentions the unmentionable in his essay, Bailing out the states: the momentum and the prospect for violence builds. Excerpts:

If their residents find that government largesse is no longer flowing; and if they believe that they're entitled to such largesse; then they're going to get out of control and try to take what they want. The results are likely to be catastrophic for law and order, and civil society.

I think the ordinary people of America realize this. After all, that's why they bought more guns in March than any other month in previous US history. They're getting ready to defend what's theirs—and I believe they're right in anticipating the need to do so...

You want to know why my friends want me to upgrade their rifles? You want to know why I've been warning about COVID-19 as a threat to personal security, and suggesting ways to keep your shooting skills honed, even during the lockdown? ... Look no further.

American Gun News – Another Maryland Man Red-Flagged to Death by the Cops … cops shot him through a window while asleep in bed. They also shot his pregnant girlfriend

Power grab, Sovereign Man – If you think about 9/11 in particular, its remarkable how much power the government grabbed, and how many freedoms they took away. What I’m most concerned about at this point is not the virus, nor even the economic devastation.They have us all cowering in our homes, stripped of the most basic freedoms to do just about anything. People are being thrown off their own private property because they’re not an ‘official resident’ of the town. Others have been arrested for attending a funeral. Others threatened with jail for their social media posts. There’s going to be a huge impact on our freedom from this astonishing growth of unchecked government power.

Lockdown, The Z Man – You can’t help but wonder if what we are seeing is just a dry run for something more permanent in the future. I don’t think this was premeditated. Like the radicals of the French Revolution, our rulers are now captive to events they set in motion. As the evidence stacks up it is clear the lock downs were a terrible idea, but the people in charge have the whiff of authoritarianism in their nostrils and like a rutting beast they can think of nothing else. They are now busy dreaming up more insane restrictions just to humiliate people. It is increasingly difficult to remain a reasonable person. I’m getting a little salty.

Debt, Paul Craig Roberts – An economic system that enriches the rentier class by converting as much of personal income as possible to the service of debt is an economic system that is dead in the water. One possible way out is a debt writedown in order to create some discretionary income. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan substituted growth in consumer debt for the missing income growth, and by this substitution created discretionary income by loading up the consumer with debt. That load is now full. We are in the unenviable position of having very high stock prices in an economy that has no growth potential. The high stock prices are the product of trillions of dollars injected into financial asset prices.

Charles Smith at Of Two Minds has posted strategies for surviving tough times. He does not claim to deal with a collapse of civilization, but rather the slower and uneven “devolution” he sees as more likely. He advises developing multiple skillsets and social networks, cutting expenses and relying on health and social wealth.

Mr. Smith is not just one of my regular reads, he's one of those few I often reread. His particular "take" on events is worth close attention, always well thought out and grounded in fact. However, he's not talking about survival, he's talking about enduring tough times. To this end he suggests avoiding extreme preps as "predicated on a decisive 'end of the world as we know it'".

I believe he's an optimist.

Being a generous nice guy with community connections is not a viable strategy for surviving the emerging catastrophe. And emerging it is. Understand what we're looking at. Shopping became raiding as the collapse visibly accelerated. Civic compliance is being quietly withdrawn   as government leaders and their credentialed experts reveal themselves as corrupt opportunists and inept posers .

No one "survived" the Great Depression any more than they "survived" the good times. They bore up, endured and got through. People "survived" real catastrophes; Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde or the homicidal slave labor camps of the last century.

Survivalism is unpleasant and difficult, but it's the only alternative in unpleasant and difficult times. It won't be about becoming a handy, well liked member of a cozy little community. Open handed nice people with their Norman Rockwell settlements will be ruthlessly exploited and left for dead. Viable communities will emerge, but more like the Bielski or Forest Brothers woodland partisans, minus the antique politics.

Preparationalism—known as  "prepping"—is part of survival, not survivalism itself. Preppers posit hard times and scarcity. Survivalists posit destitution, murderous chaos, pestilence and famine. Survival is prepping's precondition, not visa versa.

Mr. Smith talks like a nineteenth century idealist with a stock portfolio. It would please me if he were right, but betting the other way is wiser. We ain't seen nothin' yet.

Matthew Walther at The Week describes the decade ahead:

This is what the end of the end of history looks like. We had asked ourselves how it would appear and when. These questions mattered, and not only incidentally. They matter less now as we prepare for what I suspect will be at least a decade of immiseration on a scale unimaginable to at least three generations...

Here I think foreboding is justified. Trends that were worrisome long before we had heard of the new virus are accelerating to a point at which they are probably irreversible.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit notes the quiet self-authorized reopenings and says,

The shutdowns were sold as “two weeks to slow the spread,” and “flattening the curve,” and so on, and lots of people thought that was sensible, and it was. A two-month (or longer) shutdown is a different animal, and nobody consented to that. So now people are, mostly silently, withdrawing their consent from the state.

Ruling system, The Z Man – If you take time to read up on the Flynn case or the much larger plot around it, you see a large cast of people with one thing in common. They all live together as a social class and social relationships transcend the formal positions and titles of the people. Once a ruling class becomes a ruling community, reform is no longer possible. The only way to change the system is to decapitate it. The lesson of the Soviet system is that technology can perpetuate the community until it exhausts itself. The low quality of the people involved in the FBI shenanigans suggests they are reaching the same point as the Soviets in the 1980’s.

Serfdom, American Mind – The barbarians who seized Roman lands took advantage of chaos to fuel their ascendancy in what became the Middle Ages. Pestilence-driven depopulation and weakened political institutions enabled them to establish their hegemony over shrinking economies. Yet to assure their power, the Medieval aristocracies needed a belief system that would allow them to control the lower classes effectively. Today this role is played by a far-reaching “expert class” teeming with highly-credentialed functionaries.

Jim Quinn at The Burning Platform sees a catastrophic end to the ongoing disintegration :

The dichotomy between what is happening in the real world and what is happening in the world of the financiers will lead to violent upheaval on a timeline not anticipated by the ruling class. There is a good reason gun stores were overwhelmed with business at the outset of this over-hyped flu pandemic. Trust in the government, central bankers, the corporate media, and “experts” is disintegrating rapidly. The anger and disillusionment grows by the day and pockets of resistance are propagating throughout the country...

The only thing that matters is we will experience a disastrous outcome in the very near future from this reckless issuance of debt. The civic decay has entered the confrontational stage, with sides taken, weapons at the ready, awaiting the spark which will ignite the dynamite.

Reopen the nation, American Thinker – Hundreds of thousands of businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy and permanent closure. 33+ million are unemployed, and the federal government is creating massive unsustainable debt. This nation has made the biggest blunder in its history. The time has come for the politicians from the President to the Governors and Mayors to stop hiding behind the scientist/bureaucrats and fully reopen the nation. Focus on that segment of the population most at risk, without compulsory isolation or de facto imprisonment. And restore the civil liberties that have been wantonly eroded.

Fred Reed, Unz Review – We are told that In China, everything you say or do is monitored. Obviously China is a most terrible place. Who could doubt it? By contrast, in America, cameras are everywhere, all email is recorded, every bank transaction, credit-card purchase, who you called by telephone and when, and of course criminal records. Since little of this is directly done by the federal government, we do not live in a surveillance state. After all, none of the entities involved would share their information with the feds–would they?

From the woodpile report; July will tell the truth about the economy. I’ve chosen November as the month of general truth, whether the years following will be of manageable coping, of unexampled disaster, or something in between.

We could see a return to pre-Covid conditions, the economy revive, preps largely unneeded. Or hard times will persist but get no worse than they are now, with normalcy slowly returning, preps helpful but not critical. Or daily life could worsen long term and become the new normal, modest preps necessary but sufficient until a slow turnaround takes hold some years out.

Or systemic disruption and shortages could multiply, the recession deepen into a depression  , extensive preps needed to make it from one month to the next. Or it could become a general disaster with outright starvation, government rule by decree, cities uninhabitable, regional withdrawals into fiefdoms, and only extensive preps being enough to avoid personal catastrophe. Or we'll see a rapid and unstoppable national and global collapse, criminal raids on a regional scale, rule by force, preps depleted or confiscated and the widespread rise of outright survivalism.

Preppers attempt to maintain some or most of their present circumstances in tough times. The survivalist has his own definition of preps. He practices to survive by anticipating and training for the worst of the possibilities. 

Survivalism comes first, not last, because in the end preps assume the prepper survives to use them.

There are entirely reasonable variations on these themes. This is merely my personal arrangement.

He also goes on to say…

It appears we're at the start of an economic collapse similar to that of 1929 and into the 1930s. What we're seeing in Minneapolis and  elsewhere appears to add the danger of organized violence.

A widespread decampment from big cities began some time ago and appears to be accelerating. Bloomberg reports RV sales are up 30%  in some urban places. 

The causes are fascinating but in the end what matters is how their migration to the "flyover country" they so despise may affect your personal plans.

July, when the long term direction of the economy will be plain to see, may be your last opportunity to shape your preparations more exactly, meaning food, shelter and protection. November is the month of the presidential election, when all sides reveal their intentions and one is chosen. It's also when winter weather begins. 

Time is running out.

Conclusion

The much awaited “Fourth Turning” has arrived.

• Unrest emerges in neighborhoods, suburbs…

The United States is in a state of “free fall” and it’s only going to get worse. The American leadership are just actors reading scripted lines to appeal to the masses of under-educated, and easily manipulated serfs. This is a time when the actors and figureheads need to step aside and real leaders take the helm.

It’s not going to happen.

The only one that can prepare for this is you.

• Friendships are your most valuable asset. Know everyone in your local neighborhood. Create strong friendships and alliances. Start today.
• Keep your family close, protected and guarded. Youth must be corralled and controlled. They can easily create problems.
• Organize and support each other. If no one stands up to lead, then you must do so. This could mean sharing resources, group patrols or sharing assets. Now is the time to organize.
• Not every area is the same. Some areas will suffer more than others. Do not compare yourself to others. Just do the best in your little “neck of the woods”.
• Things MIGHT calm down. I however, believe that this is the start of a three year long event cycle. Plan for the worst, but be cautiously hopeful.

About the urban rioters announcing that they are coming to the suburbs next…

“I would tell them, if you value your life, you probably shouldn’t do that in Polk County. Because the people of Polk County like guns, they have guns, I encourage them to own guns, and they’re going to be inside their homes tonight with their guns loaded. And if you try to break into their homes tonight and try to steal, to set fires, I’m highly recommending they blow you back out of the house with their guns.”

-Sheriff Grady Judd

Some misc updates…

• Seattle taken over by a War Lord, sets up a CHAZ; a no police zone.

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